Test Design

Articles

Equivalence partitioning and boundary value analysis are two specification-based techniques that are useful in black box testing. This article defines each of these techniques and describes, with examples, how you can use them together to create better test cases. You can save time and reduce the number of test cases required to effectively test inputs, outputs, and values.

So you have the responsibility of a new team and getting an entirely new web automation test infrastructure up and running. Here are the hurdles, pitfalls, and successes one QA director encountered, along with the milestones the team defined to measure success, how they migrated their existing manual tests, and the path they took to establish the new web test automation initiative.

Today’s mobile behaviors and expectations have radically changed, a result of the continuous evolution of mobile technology and the myriad new ways users can now interact with mobile. Because of this advancement in technology and user behavior, testing organizations must also advance their mobile testing solutions to ensure they continue to deliver the most intuitive, up-to-date experience possible.

Monitoring makes your testing work easier, helps you manage certain biases you may have, and lets you learn a lot about the product, users, and even your own processes. Here are seven concrete benefits testers get from monitored data that you can use to convince your team to implement monitoring—as well as realize for yourself.

Acceptance test-driven development is a whole-delivery cycle method that allows the entire team to define system behavior in specific terms before coding begins. These conversations align the expectations of the testers, developers, and product owners, forcing any silly arguments to happen before someone has to create the code twice. Here are some great beginner exercises for teaching ATDD.

“Shift left” is one of the latest buzz terms in software testing. Movements like agile and DevOps recommend that testers shift left, but what does that mean, exactly? Here's how one tester became a believer in the shift-left movement; how he got his team's developers, analysts, designers, and managers on board; and how his entire organization has benefited from the shift.

Technical debt is an inevitable side effect of legacy code. Some code can (and should) be pruned, but institutional memory fades—what if there's a reason certain lines were included that may not be immediately obvious? Done right, unit tests can serve as documentation. Later on, these tests can illuminate what the developer was thinking when they created the code.

If someone says a feature is not testable through the methods we use, it does not absolve us from the responsibility of testing; that's still our job. When this team was given a new connected device to test, they realized their existing functional testing skills wouldn't be sufficient to test the product's core algorithm. So the team got creative, learning the source code and introducing fault injection, figuring out new ways to test.

There is a lot of talk in the testing world about shifting left. Basically, “shift left” refers to moving the test process to an earlier point in the development process, independent of the development approach. This article explores a case in which shift-left has been applied, and the lesson is that shifting left cannot be achieved by testers alone—it must result from a team effort.

Allowing minor defects to be included in releases impacts our customers’ perspective on software professionalism. We’ll never catch every weird, obscure bug, but there are some design elements where they tend to lurk. By focusing our testing efforts on these areas—or at least not neglecting them—we can catch more issues before our customers do.

Read the new eGuide from TechWell offering some of the most popular articles from experts in the field laid out in a comphrensive, 21-page guide. Explore the advice, tips, and philosophy on advancing your agile team wether you're new to agile or looking to improve upon your team's agile approaches. Learn the role of an agile coach, the agile mindset, a test manager's place in agile, and more. Download here.